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This is a guest post by Julie Zeilinger, 19-year-old undergraduate student at Barnard College, Columbia University, and Founder and Editor of the FBomb.org, a feminist blog/community for teens and young adults who care about their rights and want to be heard. She's also the author of A Little F’d Up: Why Feminism Is Not A Dirty Word. This post is Julie’s answer to: “Why do young women shy away from leading?”

Throughout my entire high school career, and even in my college years, I have watched intelligent, motivated and capable young women shy away from leadership positions. Considering that the concept of leading anything was unimaginable to most of our grandmothers, and considering the hard work feminists did in the 70s to assure my generation of women the right to take our seat at the table, it can be beyond disheartening and frustrating to watch young women look these positions in the face and turn in the opposite direction. Clearly we don’t face the type of sexism our grandmothers did, so why do so many of us fail to lead? Are we selfish or ungrateful for the work of the women who came before us? Not quite.

My peers and I, the young women of today, may not face the type of Mad Men-esque sexism that once prohibited women from leading (at least not universally – sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination certainly still thrive today and continue to impede the progress of many of us). But the reasons we fail to lead are still sexist in nature: they’re just far subtler than they once were. The truth is many young women today fail to lead because of the pressure put on young women to be perfect and moreover the disparity in what we teach our sons as opposed to our daughters.

One of the major goals of the women’s movement was to make it possible for women to do anything men can do – professionally or otherwise. And while our mothers and grandmothers were largely successful in this respect, making it possible for women to pursue the same leadership positions as men, to some extent the problem was only addressed superficially. We addressed laws and policy, but failed to acknowledge or alter the psychological factors that prohibit or encourage women to want to lead and which allow society to embrace female leaders and take them seriously.

As Courtney E. Martin wrote in her book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, “we are a generation of young women who were told we could do anything and instead heard that we had to be everything.” The recent debate over “having it all” underscores the pressure women put themselves under to perfectly excel in all conceivable areas of our lives. While the “having it all” debate as it has been most recently presented (balancing domestic and professional roles) may not be the most relevant issues high school or college-aged women face at this stage in our lives, we definitely exist in our own “having it all” paradigm. We feel that we need to excel in our academic lives, maintain perfect romantic relationships and – above all else -- maintain perfect bodies that match or rival those that are plastered in the media, which teens consume an average 10 hours and 45 minutes of every day. And with every passing year it seems this self-destructive, unattainable quest becomes all the more consuming, dominating more of our time and energy and taking us prisoner at younger and younger ages.

Young women today are bred to doubt ourselves, question our worth and view ourselves as improvable projects rather than embrace the imperfection of our humanity. According to the Dove Real Beauty Campaign, 42% of first to third-grade girls want to be thinner. 80% of ten-year-old American girls say they have been on a diet. 53% of 13-year-old girls are unhappy with their bodies – a number that increases to 78% by age 17. By the time we’re old enough to seriously consider becoming leaders, the majority of us are crippled by insecurities about the way we look, which we internalize and equate with our sense of worth on all levels. Moreover, the media convinces us that we exist for men to sexualize and desire us – we are not the subject of our own lives, but rather the object. This is why, for example, when you walk into any given high school – or even middle school – class, the majority of hands raised, of voices speaking out, will be those of boys and most girls will sit silently, not trusting themselves to speak, afraid that all they have to offer is inferior.

But the media is not just at fault for producing images that diminish our bodies and thus our self-confidence and self worth; it must also be held accountable for the treatment of the women who do in fact dare to lead. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were presented not as political candidates, but rather as stereotypes and opposite ends of sexist dichotomies. Both women’s ideals were dismissed in exchange for commentary on their physical attractiveness or their ability or inability to live up to typical definitions of femininity. Not only were these women abused and constantly criticized for attempting to lead, they were again reduced to the way they looked, for how they achieved or failed to achieve a ridiculous standard of perfection and ultimately femininity. It would take an extremely self-assured young women to observe this treatment and see that aspiring to such a leadership role results in receiving the same ridiculous scrutiny, the same frustrating dismissal of her ideals. It would take an extremely self-assured young woman in a culture that encourages young women to be anything but.

And yet male candidates of years past have done far worse than fail to live up to a standard of beauty or the epitome of their gender role and have escaped condemnation – in many cases, they are even rewarded. Mayor of D.C. Marion Barry was re-elected to his political position after serving time in prison on a conviction of cocaine possession. Former Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer resigned from his position after a prostitution scandal and was rewarded with a lively career as a political commentator. While women – in politics and beyond – are scrutinized and dismissed as a viable candidate for something as inconsequential to leadership skills like lack of sex appeal men can weather far more serious transgressions and emerge relatively unscathed.

Ultimately, women equate leadership with perfection in a way that men don't. Men are generally taught that perfection is not a necessary component of success, that, in fact, they can fail miserably – even commit felonies -- and still bounce back to power. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule (like Martha Stewart's bounce back to power after incarceration, for instance) but largely, men are taught they are entitled to leadership in a way women are not.

So, why don’t women want to lead? The answer is in the pages of the magazines we read and now even in the news coverage of the political debates we watch, which promote cultural standards that destroy women’s confidence and prescribe unattainable standards in all areas of our lives. In order for women to lead – for women to want to lead, to feel that we are capable of leading – we need to redefine leadership altogether. We need to define leadership not as perfection but as intelligence, honesty and doing the right thing. It is also essential that we question and change a society that sets the standard for achievement impossibly high for women and upsettingly low for men.

In this day and age – especially in this day and age – I think we can all agree that we are in desperate need of strong leadership. The bottom line is that discouraging half of the population from leading -- beyond being sexist, wrong and regressive -- narrows the pool of capable candidates in a way that we simply can’t afford. So the next time the opportunity presents itself, convince the smart, talented young women in your life that they don’t need to fit an unattainable, unrealistic standard of perfection to lead: let them know their intelligence and integrity are more than enough.